James Webb Space Telescope 'wings' successfully deployed

Recently inside the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, engineers successfully completed two deployments for the James Webb Space Telescope's "wings" or side portions of the backplane ...

Peeking into our galaxy's stellar nursery

Astronomers have long turned their telescopes, be they on satellites in space or observatories on Earth, to the wide swaths of interstellar medium to get a look at the formation and birth of stars. However, the images produced ...

Image: The Magellanic Clouds and an interstellar filament

Portrayed in this image from ESA's Planck satellite are the two Magellanic Clouds, among the nearest companions of our Milky Way galaxy. The Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160 000 light-years away, is the large red and orange ...

Old astronomic riddle on the way to be solved

Scientists at the University of Basel were able to identify for the first time a molecule responsible for the absorption of starlight in space: the positively charged buckminsterfullerene. Their results have been published ...

Image: Akari view of the Cygnus region in the Milky Way

The constellation of Cygnus is one of the most recognisable in the northern hemisphere. During the summer months, the stars of its long neck stretch along the Milky Way and its wings sweep from side to side.

Complex organic molecules discovered in infant star system

For the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disk surrounding a young star, suggesting once again that the conditions that spawned ...

NASA Ames reproduces the building blocks of life in laboratory

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, cytosine, and thymine, three key components of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed ...

One of the Milky Way's arms might encircle the entire galaxy

Given that our Solar System sits inside the Milky Way Galaxy, getting a clear picture of what it looks like as a whole can be quite tricky. In fact, it was not until 1852 that astronomer Stephen Alexander first postulated ...

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